Klarinet Archive - Posting 000373.txt from 2004/01

From: "Joseph Wakeling" <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Wagner
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 09:25:25 -0500

Dan Leeson wrote:

<< I became aware of the racist contents of a number of his operas (The Ring
cycle, Meistersinger, Flying Dutchman, and Parsifal, for example), that I
stopped playing and even listening to Wagner's music. >>

That's an interesting comment. I am not really familiar with Wagner's music
but I came across this debate recently in reading the collected
conversations of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Barenboim was pretty
emphatic that if you just take the text of the operas, as they are, they are
not racist or anti-semitic, and that it's our interpretation (e.g. presuming
that certain characters are meant to be Jewish) that makes them so. Said
was less convinced by this, pointing out that certain characters fit into
the mould of various racist stereotypes of the time even if they weren't
explicitly identified as such. But of course in modern times those
stereotypes don't necessarily apply and we are not obliged to interpret them
in such a way.

It seems to me that this fits quite nicely into the point Tony Pay has
raised on several occasions about the difference in attitude between the
question "What is the text?" and "What is the composer's intention?"

-- Joe

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